Canada Trip, Part Two

Woke up in bed and breakfast.  Took showers.  Had breakfast with three British people: a couple from... somewhere... and an older woman from... somewhere.  Three classic English stereotypes: the sweet, gentle matriarch, the witty, dry patriarch, and the somewhat terse and surly single woman, who wondered if it was an American thing to put syrup on everything.  I was thinking, yeah, it could be!

We left for Toronto.  One and an half hour drive, Lake Ontario on the right for much of the way.  Stopped at a gas station and used the ATM to get some Canadian money.  Canadian money has translucent areas and the Queen.  Canada needs to stop being really into the Queen!  At the Guildwood station we boarded the Via Train to Montreal.  Canadian trains rule.  Had a Falafel wrap.  Did a crossword puzzle.  Read about Montreal.  Eavesdropped on the couple sitting behind us, who were Australian.  (Much of all trip in general was spent eavesdropping on people with funny accents.)

Montreal looked a lot more graffitied than I thought it would.  From the train station to our Airbnb, a mile or two stretch of Rue Rene Levesque, which was split between semi-soulless looking restaurants, massive developments in progress, old-ass churches.  We followed a bunch of tourists for much of the way.  As we crossed the street we saw some window-washing people rushing in the street to "do their work" on some strangers' vehicles.  We would see the same people again a day later doing the same thing.

The Airbnb was funky.  A hollowed-out old apartment/dorm building.  Our room (and it was only one room, plus a very small bathroom) had a pointless dishwasher, pointless because I can't imagine why you'd ever have more than two people over and ever be using more than like a spoon to eat your Kraft Dinner at their shitty little table.  The mattress was hard and squeaky.  We took a nap, and then explored a bit.  Crescent St had a lot of fun-looking places, so of course we went to a somewhat lame English pub called Winston Churchill's.  Ok, not lame... The patio was great, and allowed me a perfect view of the massive drawing of Leonard Cohen they've plastered on one of the tallest downtown buildings.  (Nice tribute!)  But the food was no great shakes.  There was a "Football Sunday" menu (in Canada!) which my insanity forced me to order from.  Had the first of many somewhat overpriced beers.

We wandered up Mont Royal, truly one of the great nights of this year (or any!).  Dark paths and scariness, seemed like there was nobody around.  The vistas kept getting more and more spectacular.  We got to the top, to this uninhabited Chateau thing, where hundreds of folks milled around.  All kinds of people and cultures in Montreal.  Scores gathered around to hear a man play a sad, beautiful piano song.  We took selfies as we gazed out onto the spectacular stretch of Montreal.

Back down the hill, one more bar, a "futuristic-retro" themed place.  First placed where we said out loud, "hey, the servers here are all really nice" (we'd do this again).  Had cocktails and watched American football with French subtitles.  Just unreal.

All of my achievements

That is what I'm going to re-name my blog.

And here they are, btw:

1. Graduated high school
2. Graduated college
3. Two years of Americorps service
4. 7+ years of retail work
5. Got married
6. About to buy a house

That actually looks better than I thought it would.

Canada Trip, Part One

We were awakened by our friends bursting through our front door singing.  I jumped out of bed naked and called from the second story, "Who is it?"  They said their names.  And then they realized that they weren't supposed to come over to take care of the cat till the next day.  They left and we went back to bed.

The morning and early afternoon we went over the house contract.  We signed off on it on E's phone.  We couldn't get service outside in the parking lot of the Taco Bell so we ended up signing within the walls of the Taco Bell.  We had ordered the usual Taco Bell fare maybe half an hour earlier.

We left for Canada.  The playlist began with "That's the Way it Is" by Celine Dion.  While listening to maybe Joni Mitchell we passed, on the other side of the highway, a truck completely engulfed in flames.  The smoke rising above it could be seen from miles away.  Bad omen?

We tried to get wings in Buffalo but were foiled by crowds of hungry Buffaloians.  Typical!  We went to some cool-looking Buffalo neighborhood to find other food.  As we parked ("North american Scum" by LCD Soundsystem on the Ipod), A called.  She said the seller had accepted the terms of the contract with no amendations.  I went "oh my god."  E went "whoo!"  We walked to a restaurant and had burgers and fries.  Great music was played at the neat Buffalo restaurant, including "See/Saw" by Jay Reatard, "Mystery" by the Wipers, "I'm a Pretender" by the Exploding Hearts, and a great deal of Ty Segall.

We drove across the bridge into Canada.  The customs guy asked us a lot of questions.  It was weird getting grilled, but we passed the test!  Into Niagara, Canadian-side, we went.

We parked the car at the Bed and Breakfast and walked up to the front door.  We tried the pin number on the reservation paper E had printed.  Nothing.  We tried it again.  Still no success.  We tried it on the back door.  We tried waving our arms at the lit-up second story window.  We trying throwing things at the second-story window.  I called the number on the sign outside.  "We're standing outside your house and can't get in," I said.  "We're going to look for other places.  Call us back."  It was close to midnight.

We drove around desperately looking for lodging.  Niagara Falls is a shitshow.  Drunks wander the streets looking for casinos like a hundred yards from the most impressive goddamn cascade of water in North America.  When I got the call back from the Bed and Breakfast at 12:30 my voice was affectless.  I didn't apologize or do anything polite.  I just said, "yeah, we're coming back."  We went back.  Code still wouldn't work.  Until it did.  We crashed.

Albert Burneko, Deadspin

Bill Simmons’s writing really is bad.

So, if his writing was always shitty, and fame and access actually improved his skill-set, then why don’t you like Simmons as much as you used to? What changed?

You did. You are not 19 anymore. You matured, read other, better writers, and eventually discovered the difference between an analogy and a reference, between affectation and personality, between pointless maundering and having something to say. You grew to prefer coherence over in-group signaling. You figured out that writing that claps you on the back and congratulates you for being careless and white and male and steeped in mainstream pop culture is the precise opposite of subversive. You lost your taste for Bill Simmons, whose writing is bad. You grew up. Good for you! Growing up is cool.

(Also, on Trump:)

The weirdest, saddest, and most unhelpful people, maybe in all the world, are: boomer liberals (like the leadership of the Democratic party, for example) who look upon Donald Trump’s lifelong track record of failing at petty crook shit—doing petty crook shit and not only getting away with it but in many cases declaring his failure a great success, and then being rewarded with greater fame and stature in turn—and insist they are seeing the work of a mastermind, rather than the tides of American life and culture carrying yet another born-rich shit-for-brains white asshole past and above any and all demands and consequences. The idea of Trump is the sucker-ass belief in meritocracy, in hoary old Great Man bullshit, twisted into its most horrible gargoyle incarnation. He’s rich and famous, he’s the president of the country, and therefore it just simply must be the case that he has earned this station for himself, one way or another, via some expression of traits that make him equal to it. He has to be some kind of genius, even if it’s the evil kind. There is no way that a braying worthless dope, a man with no qualities of any kind to recommend him, could have ended up where Trump has ended up.